The New Confessions (30 page)

The first film I shot—Maude himself directing—was a
Fido
two-reeler called
Fido at the Wheel
. It was shamefully dire, but I did not care. I was thrilled, excited, intensely grateful to be working. I loved the Islington studio. I was in awe of the actors and actresses. I gawped at Warwick Sheffield’s sophistication; I thought Alma Urban the most sensuously beautiful woman I had ever seen. To be allowed to mingle with these luminaries was a fabulous privilege. It did not last. When I heard Harry Bliss’s anecdotes for the third time it took a massive effort to keep the smile pasted on my face. It was not long before I detected a faint but unmistakable West Country burr beneath Flora de Solla’s “French” accent. Warwick Sheffield borrowed five pounds from me one evening after filming and never paid me back.… No matter. For a year or so I was entranced. I filmed
Anna Learns to Fly, Anna Triumphant!
and
Fido’s Fortune
and many more. Then Maude teamed me up with Faithfull and we made two 7-reelers:
Sanctuary
with Alec Neame and Alma Urban, and
Taboo
starring Reggie Fitzhamon, Flora de Solla and Ivy Pridelle. I learned my trade. Panorams, Akeley shots. How to deploy effectively the electric lights when London fogs made daylight filming difficult: the mercury vapor lamps, the sunlight arcs, the tilts, toplights and spotlights. I was happy; not even Faithfull could disturb me.

Of course Faithfull had not been pleased at my arrival. “We wondered what had become of you, Todd,” he said. His attitude was always cool, though we worked well enough together as a team. But when I saw how complacently Faithfull directed (he was at the height of his renown in the years immediately following the war), I began to have ambitions to direct myself. I went regularly to the cinema, to American and European films, and I soon realized how deficient Superb-Imperial’s product was in almost every area. I worked out a story about a young officer returning from prisoner-of-war camp to find that his fiancée has married his best friend. He tries to be brave and cope with the shocking disappointment, but, to their dismay, the two ex-lovers find
their passion renewing itself. The hero ends up with two choices: kill his best friend or himself. He opts for suicide to preserve his fiancée’s happiness. I called it
Love’s Sacrifice
.

I took my outline to Maude after I had been with Superb-Imperial for eighteen months. Maude was a diffident-looking man with a slack innocuous face and a soft gray toothbrush moustache. He wore light-brown suede shoes and well-tailored suits. His wife, Rosita, was an overweight extravagant woman with vast breasts and a large mole on one cheek that, oddly, added a strange glamour to her. I think she was half Portuguese—or entirely Portuguese, I am not sure. The money behind Superb-Imperial came from sugar estates in Portuguese East Africa. I rather liked her. She spoke fast breathless English and smoked little black knobbled cheroots in a squat bone holder.

Maude called me into his office above the carpenters’ shops a couple of days later. Rosita stood behind his chair. I was busy on Taboo. We had been filming a downpour in a jungle. I remember my hair was wet.

“About
Love’s Sacrifice,
” he began. He looked doleful. “I’m disappointed, John, very disappointed that you could suggest this to me.”

“Sorry?” I was baffled.

“Is not Superb film,” Rosita added loudly. “Is dram. Melodram, yes, maybe. But dram, no. Not at a Superb.”

“Remember this, John, and you won’t go off the rails. We want people to come out of our cinemas with a smile on their faces. Happy endings, please.”

There was more of the same platitudinous nonsense. It was possibly the most sustained bout of bad advice I had ever received. I went back to the dank jungles of
Taboo
.

Two more of my ideas were turned down for similar reasons. I told Sonia of my troubles on a Saturday afternoon as we sat in a tearoom on the New King’s Road. It must have been October or November.
Taboo
was over. I was now working on
Fido Saves the Day
. Sonia was neat in an emerald-green suit trimmed with black velvet. She had put her spectacles on to read the menu. I noticed that she was wearing a little lipstick. I liked to kiss her when she was wearing lipstick (we had progressed that far); I enjoyed the sweet waxy taste. She was going “Tum tum tum tum” as she read through the menu. I looked at her white parting, drilled across the crown of her head, and felt a sudden weakness in my lungs, as if breathing were an effort, and a curious spiraling sensation in my groin. The waitress came over.

“Pot of tea for two. Ceylon, please. A slice of cherry cake and a rock cake. Wha’ abou’ you, Johnny?” She had a slight glottal stop in her London accent, which she was taking pains to make more genteel. I knew I was in love with her there and then.

“Cheese bun, please.”

We were married on January 18, 1922, in St. Peter’s Church, Filmer Road, Fulham. No member of my family was present. My father sent fifty pounds, Oonagh her best wishes and Thompson a set of six silver-plated apostle spoons.

I now realize that I married Sonia for sex. I was almost twenty-three years old and still a virgin. Before I met Sonia my previous sexual contact with a human being (apart from myself) had been with Karl-Heinz back in Weilburg. And with a woman? Huguette in the dim shed behind the
estaminet
in 1917. I will not bore you with the details of my and Sonia’s sexual apprenticeship, the gaffes and moist surprises of our wedding night (we honeymooned in Hove over a weekend—I was needed for filming on the Monday), but for two virgins we soon became quite proficient at the act. I was very fond of Sonia’s plump friendly body. She had small firm breasts with odd domed nipples, and remarkably luxuriant pudenda. She used depilatory creams on her armpits and on her legs below the knee. I pleaded vainly with her to let the hair grow again. I liked her too, I confess, because she was strange to me. English, a Londoner, almost as foreign as Huguette, and upper lower class with an uneducated accent. She fell pregnant two months after the marriage. It seemed that after a twenty-three-year delay I was now racing headlong after maturity. I wanted a girl child. I felt I was not ready for a son and heir.

When Maude rejected my reworked version of Love’s
Sacrifice
—the hero, about to commit suicide, learns of his rival’s death in a motoring accident and is then reunited with his former fiancée—I was on the point of abandoning all my ambitions to direct. Superb-Imperial were making their most expensive film ever, a historical-romance-adventure called
The Blue Cockade
, set in some Ruritanian never-never land. It was costing eighteen thousand pounds, Faithfull was to direct and I was to be cameraman. Maude, in another astute move on his part, or possibly at Rosita’s behest, went to America and hired Mary Mount at a thousand pounds a week to star. Faithfull had negotiated a bonus over
his salary of two thousand pounds. Out of the goodness of his heart, Maude gave me one of five hundred. Suddenly I seemed preposterously well off and secure. It was Sonia who urged me to try one more idea on the Maudes.

I do owe her this, I admit it. I would have done nothing more without her encouragement. Looking back on my hectic life, those early years in London now appear an island of bourgeois inertia and complacency. We had our flat above the pub (three pounds a week), and I could send down for beer whenever I liked. I had a well-paid, stimulating and not too arduous job. I had a pretty, adoring wife. The fly feasting in the jam jar feels no need for a change of scene.

Maude and Rosita
loved
the idea of
Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes
. (I will not inflict the plot on you. It is all there in the title anyway.) They loved it so much, they took me off
The Blue Cockade
. The film could start as soon as the script was written. I set to work immediately.

For some reason Harold Faithfull took my transferral from his film as a personal insult. Maude gave me a small office next to the sprocket-punching department where I worked on the logistics of the production. Early one evening, as the girls next door were packing up, Faithfull confronted me.

Faithfull had grown sleeker since the war. He wore expensive clothes and that evening a ray of sun caused his yellow cashmere cardigan to blaze with arrogant wealth. His sulky handsome face gleamed. He was perspiring slightly, either from drink, choler or the steepness of the stairs.

“What do you think you’re playing at, Todd?” he demanded. He stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette. He glanced round my office. “What are you trying to do with your poxy little film?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Either this is a misguided attempt to ruin me or you’ve got some nasty little back-street ambitions of your own.”

“You know I’ve always wanted to make my own films.”

“But you’re a cameraman, Todd. Always will be. I’m the director.”

The patrician disdain in his voice made me angry.

“But you couldn’t direct traffic in a one-way street, Faithfull,” I said calmly.

It was not such a brilliant riposte, I admit, but it did well in the heat
of the moment. Faithfull lumbered forward and swung a punch at me across the desk. He missed, but his momentum knocked some papers and an inkwell to the floor. Ink spattered the cuffs of his pale mushroom trousers.

“You fucking Scottish lumphead!” he yelled. “You make this film and you’ll never make another!” He stomped out of the room. Some of the girls looked in, giggling, to see what all the fuss was about.

I was panting with excitement. I felt strangely invigorated. I knew why Faithfull was so upset: it was an oblique tribute to my crucial contribution to
Sanctuary
and
Taboo
. Faithfull needed me and he was worried about producing
The Blue Cockade
without me. I replaced the papers and inkwell on the desk and blotted up the stains. For the first time I had had my own confidence in my talent and ability confirmed—and by a hostile witness, no less. I wore a modest smile of satisfaction all the way back to Fulham.

It was Sonia’s father, Vincent, who pointed out the advertisement to me. Every Sunday we had dinner
chez
Shorrold. They lived in a small, brown, terraced house with a good view of Fulham Palace football ground. The meal never changed—gravy soup, leg of mutton, fruit tart with custard; neither did the atmosphere of stifling boredom. After the meal, Sonia and her mother, Noreen—a decent, dull, long-suffering woman—washed up, giving the men the opportunity for a smoke. Vincent Shorrold was a small spry chap with the impressive but ultimately fragile self-assurance of a traveling salesman. He would initiate conversations with remarks of what seemed at first adamantine authority.

“No. No question. No, definitely. The Allies should take over all of Germany’s mines and forests. Every last tree.” He was reading about the reparation conference in his newspaper. “It’s the only way. The only justice.”

“But Vincent,” I said reasonably, “what we need is cash. Seizing mines and forests won’t provide any cash.”

He looked trapped, dismayed. “Oh.… Oh yes. Perhaps. I see what you mean.” He turned back to his newspaper.

Most of our discussions ran in this manner. Aggressive assertion, polite rebuttal on my part, wordless collapse. He smoked a pipe with a little perforated lid on the bowl. This attachment made me illogically irritated. I heard the clatter of cutlery on crockery from the kitchen and the indistinct noises of Sonia and her mother talking. I felt a profound
inertia penetrate me; the air of the room seemed to brew with apathy. I gazed emptily ahead, a thin rope of smoke from my cigarette swaying and shimmying in front of me.

“This was your mob, wasn’t it?” He read: “Thirteenth (Public School) Service Battalion, South Oxfordshire Light Infantry.…” He folded the paper open and handed it over. It was an advertisement for a reunion parade and dinner a month hence. Former members of the battalion were invited to foregather on Wandsworth Common at 4:30
P.M
. for a brief parade and address by a Brigadier General Pughe, followed by dinner in the function rooms of the Cape of Good Hope public house in Wandsworth High Street (price, five shillings and sixpence). Applications were to be sent to R.J.M. Tuck (major, ret.).

I was a little late arriving at the common, and I could see a group of several dozen suited men already lined up in front of a small dais equipped with loudspeakers and draped in Union Jack bunting. I walked across the grass towards them, feeling a little nervous. I had been uncertain what to wear and in the end had dressed soberly, as if going to a funeral: a charcoal-gray three-piece suit and black bowler hat. I even carried a mackintosh. It was a mild September day; the chestnut trees on the common were beginning to turn. As I approached I saw that a lot of the men were carrying rolled umbrellas—surrogate rifles, I thought, and wished I had brought mine.

Someone I did not know crossed my name off a list and took my raincoat (“Can’t march with one of those over your arm!”) and I joined a column of men. I greeted a few people whom I recognized and asked myself why I had bothered to come.

We were marched off a hundred yards or so and stood easy. Then we saw three motorcars bump across the grass towards the dais. Some men got out, one of them in uniform. One man strode over to us. I recognized Major Tuck. He went to the head of the column, called us to attention, shouted, “By the left, quick march!” We marched over to the dais, were halted, saluted and were inspected by the brigadier general. Then we listened to him give a halfhearted speech about how we should not allow the iron bonds of comradeship forged in the bitter tempest of war to wither and decay in the soothing balm of peace. We were assembled, I discovered, to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the founding of the battalion. The parade ended with the surviving member of the pipe band (the others were killed, you will remember, carrying stew
to the front-line trenches in 1917) playing “The Bonnets of Bonny Dundee.” We repaired to the function suite of the Cape of Good Hope.